Something’s rotten in the state of Naughty Dog — over the past couple weeks a number of high-profile folks from the Uncharted team have left the developer, including series creative-director Amy Hennig. We could speculate all day about what’s going on behind the scenes at Naughty Dog, but hey, let’s focus on the positive! Naughty Dog’s loss is Star Wars fans’ gain, as Amy Hennig has joined Visceral Games to work on one of EA’s upcoming Star Wars projects.

Steve Papoutsis, general manager of Visceral, has some nice things to say about Amy…

“Amy has long been recognized as one of our industry’s top visionaries, and is coming off an amazing run as the Writer and Creative Director of the Uncharted franchise. I’ve always admired her approach to creative development — focusing on nailing down the soul of a game first, and then making sure the writing, the gameplay, the design and the art comes together to form a unified, interactive experience for the player. This fits in perfectly with what we’re trying to do here at Visceral and Amy’s going to help us continue in our pursuit to make the most thrilling, immersive games in the world.”

Visceral Games is, of course, the developer of the Dead Space series and, for my money, the most talented studio under the EA umbrella. Visceral + the creative director of Uncharted + the Star Wars Universe? Suddenly I’ve got a most anticipated game of 2015.

I enjoyed the Uncharted games very much, but they were often very poorly written. I can see this working though, because the cancelled SW 1313 game looked to be emulating Uncharted and that game looked promising.

I really enjoyed the first Uncharted, but the next two were almost carbon copies, and there’s only so many times you can play the same game before it gets tiring. Hopefully they won’t use the same paint-by-numbers approach with this.